[drewie]

Hello Dennis and everyone,

Exactly, I do love to let my thoughts simmer for a bit. My initial thoughts can be overwhelming and chaotic and I can easily get stuck in semantics.

So let me jump directly into the issues you raised  in your replies to me. I also didn’t mean to say that the meaning/experience category was antagonistic. Meaning ofcourse is embedded in our experience but as soon as we go after meaning consciously/rationally we also create another category of experience that of meaninglessness or at least that is how the mind understands it. I do see much more clear now after I read your replies again. The transition wasn’t going from meaning to experience so much but from tackling meaning rationally which made me transition from a rationally oriented world-view (causal) to one that was mythical (acausal) holding causality and acausality at the same time (took me a while to understand what that meant, heh), I do enjoy my paradox more these days. Now that I remember my experience better, it is true, that I had a tremendous wrestle with meaninglessness for years, an experience of alienation from my mythical self, or what Campbell would call our inner most being, no doubt. To say the battle was epical and that I got over-cooked is the understatement of the century but I went through to the other side so all is good.

I do have to say this though because that is how I feel. I still stand by my initial statement that meaning and meaninglessness has become irrelevant at this specific period of my life. Ofcourse my activities and experiences are meaningful to me, I just don’t think about it anymore, I do the stuff that seem most fulfilling to me. I did a bit of research on this experience and I found this quote from Jung which describes a lot how I feel these days.

If you marry the ordered to the chaos, you produce the divine child, the supreme meaning beyond meaning and meaninglessness. Carl Jung, Liber Novus

You gotta love Jung how he links meaning with order and chaos with meaninglessness. Yeap.. that is how it feels.

I hope sharing this, is relevant somehow with the conversation and your essay. I think it is, right? Since one of the themes on your essay is one that has to do literalism and the metaphorical. I guess going from experiencing life rationally in literal terms to something more metaphorical embracing the mythical has something to do with my thoughts and experiences, I hope. I do like to make it personal though so anyways. 🙂

Thank you very much for your time and thoughts. I do enjoy your writing style a lot and your approach to the business of living. Awesome.

~Andreas